James Fenton's rapid rise to literary fame in the early 1980s served as a climax to the emergence of a new generation of poets brought to wide attention by the publication of two influential and competitive anthologies, Blake Morrison and Andrew...

James Fenton Birchfield, 89, a retired Washington Star editor and columnist who was editor of the Loudoun Times-Mirror in Leesburg from 1975 to 1978, died Aug. 14 at a hospital in Abingdon, Va., after a series of strokes. He lived in Abingdon. Mr....

Byline: Kevin Schmit Daily Herald Sports Writer With Fenton's offense, there's always an option. When running back Eric James was stuffed up the middle, quarterback Matt Post took the run outside. When the outside wasn't there, James took it between the...

[This essay was originally published in The Listener, August 25, 1983.] James Fenton's nature doesn't appear to be vindictive, though wiser playwrights would run miles from such a risk as I now take. I declare my interest: two of my plays have been the subject of his comments. Those for Caritas I'd heard were not favourable and did not read. The practice of the craft is pain enough without subjecting oneself to the cruel ephemerality of a reviewer's opinion. When I've writ...

James Fenton is a brilliant poet of great technical virtuosity. His poetry is plunged in the real life of the kind that we see on television screens, read about in the newspapers, and (a happy few) discuss at High Tables. In the first two sections of [Children in Exile: Poems 1965–1984] there are poems about recollections of the bombing of Germany in 1944 and 1945, about Vietnamese refugees haunted by terrible memories of their bombings, about his own experiences as a political journalist visiting Vi...

The impact of James Fenton's best poems comes from the surprise of encountering the unexpected within his otherwise careful formal strategies. This seeming contradiction is a two-edged sword, however, for in Fenton's poetry there is also a distance between the poet and the poem, which is created by artifice, and which robs his most accomplished verses of their effect. The Memory of War begins with a sequence of poems titled 'A German Requiem'…. The poet is presented as the...